Hardware

At the Hot Chips conference, ARM's Nigel Stephens gave details of the new Scalable Vector Extension (SVE) for the ARMv8-A architecture. He summarized his presentation in a blog on the ARM website. ARM is significantly extending the vector processing capabilities associated with AArch64 (64-bit) execution in the ARM architecture, now and into the future, enabling implementation choices for vector lengths that scale from 128 to 2048 bits. High Performance Scientific Compute provides an excellent focus for the introduction of this technology and its associated ecosystem development. SVE features will enable advanced vectorizing compilers to extract more fine-grain parallelism from existing code and so reduce software deployment effort.
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InfoWorld has a nice summary of the IBM POWER9 announcements at the Hot Chips conference. It reports: "The sheer computing power in Power9 will make supercomputers virtually unbeatable in Jeopardy, unless a superhuman demonstrating exceptional intelligence comes along. The Power9 architecture has up to 24 cores and provides blazing throughput to speed up complex calculations." The Power9 CPUs will need the help of co-processors for tasks like machine learning, so they will have a wide range of bus slots to connect many components. Power9 is the first processor with PCI-Express 4.0, providing bandwidth of up to 16 gigatransfers per second, InfoWorld reports.
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